Monday, March 29, 2010

Steps Toward a Functioning Government

A functional Labor Board! Recess appointments that didn't include Republicans! Man, David Broader is going to be pissed:

Today President Obama announced a series of recess appointments, including – count ‘em – two seats on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Both appointees, Craig Becker and Mark Pearce, are Democrats nominees. A third nominee, Brian Hayes, a staffer for Senator Mike Enzi, was left behind to be voted on by the Senate.

The NLRB is the federal agency that oversees the laws relating to union organizing, and for more than two years, the NLRB has had just two of its five members. Those two members – one Democrat, one Republican – have had to set aside hundreds of cases on which they could not agree in anticipation of at least a third member. On the cases the two NLRB members have decided, anti-worker advocates contested the validity of those decisions all the way up to the Supreme Court this week. While discussing the extended NLRB vacancies, Chief Justice Roberts asked, “And the recess appointment power doesn’t work why?”

I didn't have my hopes up that this would go through only because Obama seems to care a lot more about the optics of things like recess appointments than I do. Thrilled to be wrong.

It should also be that both nominees are extremely qualified, and were only blocked because of their belief that unions had a right to exist, making them card carrying Marxists in the eyes of the modern day Republican party. There's simply no middle ground with these people, and it's nice to see Obama acknowledge this fact with some hardball every now and then.